One of the things that many new website owners spend a lot of time on is choosing a WordPress theme for their site. Since there are thousands of themes available, it can be tough deciding on which one to choose. The following are a couple of tips for those looking to actually make some money with their site and not just using it as a personal blog about quotes and cats and what you had for lunch.Read on…

As some of you may know, I have been writing on Weblog Tools Collection (WLTC) quite a bit lately. In this post, I would like to highlight a good tutorial I wrote on WLTC in case you guys might have missed it. The tutorial talks about one of the most important components of a blog contest: tracking RSS subscribers.

Blog contests are great tools for helping you gain readers. There are many great theories out there on the web about how to run a blog contest, but there are no tutorials that talk about how to track RSS subscribers in these contests. The tutorial will show you two simple WordPress hacks that is needed to be able to track RSS subscribers in a blog contest. Check out the full tutorial here.

When does the contest end?

This is a 2-weeks long contest. It begins 3/9/2009 12:00AM PST (-800 GMT) and ends 3/23/2009 11:59PM PST (-800 GMT).

Sponsor

This contest is sponsored by Website Templates from buytemplates.net. Buytemplates.net is a one stop shop for all your website requirements. They offer the following products and services:

Professional pre-designed website templates

Template customization

Custom template creation (custom web design)

SEO/SEM services

Website Maintenance Services

You can download hundreds of templates with a small membership fee. Their membership fee starts as low as $49 for budget, $69 for standard, and $99 for premium plans. You don’t have to hire a web designer or external web design studio and pay enormously to design a single web template.

You guys have probably noticed [and hopefully found useful] my “Weekend Links” series that I post at the end of every week. In this post, I would like to share my method of doing these posts quickly and efficiently.

Problem

I want to share my Google Reader shared items on a weekly links posts. Generate these weekly links posts manually takes a lot of time. Postalicious lets you do this all automatically, but the newer version of Postalicious was buggy for me when I tried it (2.5rc4 at the time). Postalicious version 2.0rc6 has an option for you to use Google Reader, but this option is grayed out by default unless you overwrite one of the core WordPress files (rss.php).

Solution

I used version 2.0rc6, and got around modifying the core WordPress file by feeding my Google Reader feed through Yahoo! Pipes and then back to Postalicious. Let’s go through the setup step by step. Read on…